Tara Henley’s ‘The Trust Cycle’ is a provocative but flawed look at what’s wrong with the media

On Nov. 21, 1954, Palmer Hoyt strode to the podium at the University of Arizona to accept the John Peter Zenger Freedom of the Press Award. Hoyt, the editor and publisher of The Denver Post, was being honored for his courage in standing up to Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist witch hunt — a notable exception to the timidity shown by much of the press in tangling with the Republican senator from Wisconsin.

Hoyt used the occasion to call out publishers who had enabled McCarthy’s campaign of lies and character assassination. As quoted in Bill Hosokawa’s 1976 book, “Thunder in the Rockies,” an authorized history of the Post, Hoyt told his audience, “It is true that the number of newspapers critical of McCarthy has grown during the last year or two. But there are still many of them who are his supporters, his apologists, even his devotees.” Moreover, he denounced McCarthy’s journalistic toadies for being “as short-sighted as they are self-destructive.”

The larger target of Hoyt’s disdain was the notion of journalistic objectivity, or at least a certain definition of that much-used and much-abused term.